Inside, a guard points me to the elevators and I run, air-lifting my suitcase off the polished palazzo floor. A crowd of people are ahead of me at the elevator bank, all looking up, hoping to divine which elevator will arrive first. By some miracle, the doors directly in front of me open. I press 11, then hit the doors close button repeatedly, hoping they will shut before anyone else gets on, but nothing happens. A woman in a head scarf and wig steps in just as the doors are closing. Cancer. The elevator sits there. Shut, tomblike.
“I think this one is out of service.” I press the open button. Press it again. I can feel a claustrophobia rising inside my chest, as if my body itself is trapping me. But then the elevator starts to move. It rumbles slowly up one floor and stops, opens its doors. When it is clear that no one is getting on, the elevator pulls away and heads up one more flight. Again, we stop, wait an interminably long time.
“Some kid must have pushed every button,” I say.
“It’s Shabbat,” the woman says.
“You must be fucking kidding me.” I’m on the Sabbath elevator, which stops on every floor. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
The woman looks at me as though I have contagion. Moves away.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—” I’m finding it impossible to breathe. “You don’t understand. I can’t be late. My sister is dying.”
The woman stares at the ceiling, mouth pinched in sour contempt.
I have always considered myself a tolerant person. Each to her own. Yet right now, when what’s on the line is not punishment for turning on a light switch but whether I will get to my beautiful sister in time to say goodbye—to climb into the hospital bed beside her, hold her in my arms, admit it was me who tore her Bobby Sherman poster, make her laugh with me one last time—right this second, I feel only pure rage at the stupidity of all religions. I close my eyes and pray to a God I don’t believe in that Anna will wait for me. I need to tell her what I did.
Book Four
◆
THIS SUMMER
29
Six Weeks Ago. June 19, the Back Woods.
Every morning on the pond, before Peter and the kids come in, I sweep the floorboards, making tight neat piles of dust and sand and earwigs that I then transfer into the dustpan, pile by pile, before shaking the whole thing outside underneath the nearest bush. And every morning on the pond, in that moment, I think of Anna. The briefest flash. Not so much a memory of her, as the recognition of a tiny but indelible mark, a living piece of her that still lives in me. Anna taught me how to sweep when I was seven. “Not like that, moron,” she corrected from the porch as I swung the broom around the room like a pendulum, lifting billows of dirt and dust ahead of me. “You have to do small strokes close to the ground. Make lots of little piles. Sweep inward. Otherwise that’s what happens.”
This morning when I put the broom away in its place between the refrigerator and the pantry wall, it slips sideways, falls into the cobwebby gap behind the fridge. I sigh, knowing I have no choice but to retrieve it from the spidery darkness. My mother always cleans the camp before we come, but only the places she can see. When we arrived for the summer yesterday, the first thing Maddy noticed was a massive mouse nest in the rafter above the pantry shelves.
“I’m pretending I haven’t seen it,” I overheard my mother saying to her as I passed the back door, lugging bags of our clothes in from the car. “I leave the truly horrible things for when your mother arrives.”
“I heard that,” I said.
“A family of muskrats is living in the water lilies,” she said to Maddy, ignoring me. “They’re very sweet—three little ones swim out behind their mother every morning. There were four, but I found one floating in the weeds when I was out in the canoe. His body was like a fur log. Full rigor mortis.”
“That’s nice, Mum. Thanks for sharing that with my daughter,” I called out over my shoulder.
“Are you planning to move in permanently? I’ve never seen so much stuff.”
I stopped at the end of the path and stood looking out at the pond, the bright June sky. A perfect day for a swim. “I’m so happy to be here, I can’t stand it,” I said to no one.
* * *
—
But this morning is gray and overcast, too cold for a swim. I leave the broom where it has fallen, walk down the path to our cabin, and fish around my canvas duffel for running shoes and a jog bra. Peter’s clothes are in a little heap on the floor where he took them off last night. I hang his white cotton shirt on a hook, fold his threadbare moleskin trousers and put them over the back of the chair.